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Letter from Rome, by Anna Maria Cossigahttps://frankmattermag.com/2017/07/02/letter-from-rome-by-anna-maria-cossiga-2/
https://frankmattermag.com/2017/07/02/letter-from-rome-by-anna-maria-cossiga-2/#respondSun, 02 Jul 2017 13:49:10 +0000http://frankmattermag.com/?p=869Continue reading →]]>Immigration: the quintessential problem of the century, it seems. Some analysts call immigrants “invaders,” even weapons of war; as does, for instance, K. M. Greenhill, professor at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, former assistant to John Kerry and consultant at the Pentagon, in her “Strategic Engineered Migration as a Weapon of War.”If not for the fact that is tragic, given the horrific predicaments these people must go through during their journey of hope, we could picture them as tiny, multicolored bombs ready to detonate in our faces as soon as they touch ground. Like in a sci-fi-story, where some ingenious sociopathhas invented explosive confetti to wreak havoc at a Mardi Gras party. Because we, the rich West, are indeed the Mardi Gras the migrants want to enjoy, too.

Disgracefully, some of the children of previous immigrants are, indeed, blowing themselves up so that we cannot enjoy the party, any party, any day, never again. The resulting fear leads us to tarnish everyone with the same brush, covering up the colors which, never intending to explode, could have added a new hue to our world. I’m not claiming that unchecked migration is not a problem. Neither am I saying that Islamist terrorism does not exist. Both are serious issues we must face and solve. Fear, however, is not the best adviser, in such matters. As Zygmut Bauman said, fear is a demon, one which is ready to erase what is human and humane in men.

We promise walls and fences, enforce deportations, and devise travel bans, which are in turn banned; but they, the migrants, keep on coming. Perhaps there can be no wall or fence or ban against hope.

Italy is particularly affected by the problem. People arrive every day by the hundreds – thousands, some days – crammed into boats which can barely stay afloat. Most of them are saved, many die at sea. And then what? They are “hosted” in various facilities, crammed again in spaces which could contain a maximum of 500 people, but they number 1000, 1500. Some will be granted asylum, some will maybe find a job, some will be handed an expulsion order and repatriated — very few of them, because most of the migrants will stay, illegally. And while hope fades away, they will probably become an additional tile in the already multifaceted indigenous underworld of petty crime.

No, I don’t know what should be done. But something must be done.

There’s a village, in Sicily – where most immigrants land as they reach Europe. Its name is Mazara del Vallo. It’s a tiny village of fishermen, rich in Italian art and with the urban design typical of Arab medinas: the Kasbah. Muslim immigrants, Arabs and Berbers, arrived in Mazara in 827, making it the most important juridical center of Sicily, as well as a commercial, artistic and literary one. Over the centuries, immigrants from Tunisia continued to arrive in the village, making it their home and peacefully cohabiting with the locals. Mazara is today an example of cultural métissage and successful integration. So, you see, it can be done.

____

Anna Maria Cossiga was born in Sassari, Sardinia, and moved to Rome when she was 7. She has lived in NYC and London and currently teaches cultural anthropology in Rome.

Yesterday, I ate the sun.
I picked it from the sky
Like a grape off its vine
Ripe and ready to burst.
It burned my fingertips but
I ate it anyway. I wanted to
Know if it could
Make me warm
If it could enlighten me,
A beacon in the dark.

It burned my throat,
Made me mute
I tried to cast light from
My fingers
Nothing came out.
I sat confused in the dark
And waited for
A new sun to rise.

*

from St Andrew’s Cathedral

They built a house to God,
Spires stretching to the sky,
Adam’s limp finger.

From those fingertips would have rung
The Voice of God, calling out
The time of day, weddings, funerals.

Deep within the palm they chanted
A coarse whisper of grace, curative
To lepers and the lame.

They would have held the Book,
Felt the Spirit in their hands
Hands that no longer hold

Life. Two fingers stretch
Limp to the sky, cut off from
Their god as well as their body.

__________

Timothy Poole teaches high school English in Western Connecticut. A Texas transplant, he is getting to know the northeast and some of the poetry that grows in its wild.

]]>https://frankmattermag.com/2017/07/01/two-poems-by-tim-poole/feed/119247901_10103486777182625_1586219326257306231_nfrankmattermagChanges. Story by Reilly Haskinshttps://frankmattermag.com/2017/06/28/changes-story-by-reilly-haskins/
https://frankmattermag.com/2017/06/28/changes-story-by-reilly-haskins/#respondWed, 28 Jun 2017 18:41:29 +0000http://frankmattermag.com/?p=842Continue reading →]]>Two people walk out of a building. The tall redhead, that’s me. The girl next to me, well that’s the issue. She’s really more than one. That’s the reason she was in that loony bin. My story starts a little bit in the past. So, let’s start there.

March 28th, 11:42 PM

My name is Allie Jenkins. I’m 17 years old and weigh 91 lbs. When I came to this mental hospital, the told me to write, mostly to get my feelings out. Sometimes I think it’s some thing to do in this boring place. Anyway, I came here about three days ago. My parents checked me in because they’re worried about me. I was surprised they even noticed something was wrong, when all they do is care about each other because they’re still so madly in love. I wouldn’t care as much but to them, I’m invisible. I am the daughter they never had. Maybe that’s the way I am. I don’t know. Part of it was my hunger for popularity. My best friend, Sam, and I made a pact that we would be the most popular by the end of the year. I wanted to be skinny, I stopped eating. I just said I’d do it until I was the size I desired. That’s where things went wrong I guess. When I got to my goal, I set another. I was hungrier and hungrier to be skinnier… skinniest. To prevent my parents from realizing it, I ate when they wanted me to, then I’d go to the bathroom and throw it all up. Point is it went to my head. The eyes that fell upon me in hallways were worth my stomach aches and pains from no food. To keep myself motivated, I looked in the mirror and thought: Fat. So I got skinnier.

March 29th, 3:12 PM

This place is living hell. I have to see a psychiatrist every day to discuss my state.

“How are you today?” he says through his spectacles.

I don’t want to talk.He is here for his paycheck. So why should I give him satisfaction when he doesn’t even care? They don’t really care. They care about money. If they don’t care, I don’t care, and they won’t make me.

A guy comes in to watch me eat. Its not that I like it, but something warms up inside me a little, because his attention is on me. It’s the thing that my parents have failed at giving me my whole life.

I’ve gained three pounds. I’m turning into a fat cow: 94 lbs. It’s…discomforting… in a way. My stomach isn’t hurting for the first time in years. It’s strange. I want the pain. Without it, my mind panics about other things. With it, the pain consumes me, till it’s pure ecstasy.

March 30th, 10:15 AM

Get. Me. Out. Of. Here. I think I’m going insane. (No pun intended.) I thought I heard screaming last night and when I woke up I realized it was me. They think the stupid therapist would help. It doesn’t, all this place is doing is making me worse.

“How are you today?” They ALWAYS ask.

“Paycheckly Fine… woops, I mean perfectly.”

I’m stubborn. And all they do is make me mad.I can’t even sleep well without the pain of hunger hindering my thoughts. Get. Fat. Me. Fat. Out. Fat. Of. Fat. Here. Fat.

March 30th, 7:56 PM

Who ever said “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” was a real whack-job. Whether it’s the words that people say or what they don’t say that hurt is, they’re all words. I had my first group therapy lesson today. It’s the kind of thing where if you write down all your problems and put it in a pile with everyone else’s and pick a random other’s, you would want your problems back.

Remember the girl from the beginning of the story? She’s sixteen. Her name is Joanah Parker. At first glance, you’d look at her and suspect nothing was wrong. That a shadow was just cast upon her body. But if you take a close look, her skin is dark and bruised and swollen. All. Over. When she was seven, her parents divorced, Her mom had one miss-hap night and now she’s stuck with an abusive man living with them because nothing of Joanah’s fault. And Joanah despises her mom cause she doesn’t have the strength to get up and leave him. For eight years she has been abused, which led to multiple personalities or Dissociative Identity Disorder. Guess she got the sticks and stones.

Another girl, Karen Kavitris, is in for suicidal thoughts from being teased in school about being overweight. She had been overweight since her twin brother died in a freak accident on a rainy night. I noticed the rubber bands and bracelets that run up her arm along with the long sleeves to cover her wrists so hopefully no one would notice. But it doesn’t really matter if people notice in a mental hospital, right? Here, the scars stand for anybody. It could be the symbol for this place. You could fly a flag with a picture of the scars high above this place and it would be totally normal here. But to those people that made fun of her, sticks and stones weren’t even involved (hopefully) but somewhere there was a crack. C-R-A-C-K. A word.

March 30th, 10:48 PM

I don’t know why, but I can’t stop thinking about Karen. Something about her makes me….jealous, I guess.You could say I “envy” her. I could never be able to cut like that.

I used to write all my problems down in washable marker on my arms and legs and stomach. Then I’d take a shower and hope that while the ink goes does the drain and washes away my problems off my skin, my problems would go away, too. It never really worked that way. But the way she cuts, it’s like relieving the pain for herself. But I can’t seem to find anything just for the purpose of solving my feelings. She’s stronger than I can ever be. Even when I thought I was strong, anorexic, it’s something else other than crying. I think crying makes me weak. It makes me vulnerable. So, there really is nothing else. The problems never washed down the drain with them. So, what can I do? I know this is a stupid question to ask while I’m in a mental hospital: what can I do to get better? Well, yeah, DUH. But I don’t think that works for me. I can’t be forced to get better if I don’t want to and trust me, here, I don’t want to. So, what else is there?

March 31st, 9:05 AM

“How are you today?”

Should I? No. Remember, they don’t care about you. …. But they wouldn’t get into this field of work if they didn’t care, right?Wrong. The paycheck is good. But they had to go through all those years of school just to get a good work pay check? Lawyers remember?They go through all those years of work just to lie to get a pay check. Yeah…. Okay, no I’m not giving into myself. I haven’t for as long as I’ve been this way, and I’m not going to start now.

April 1st, 11:12 AM

I realized I started wishing at 11:11. Like I just did. Even I’ve noticed a sudden change of mood toward this whole thing. It may be the burning passion to get out of this place. Or maybe the way I saw Karen and Joanah, it made me want to prove to myself that I have the strength to get better too, the way Karen tried to do other things even if it was cutting herself, and the way Joanah’s mom doesn’t do anything good for herself like leave the guy. I see how abhorrent that is. Maybe I’m trying to prove to my self that I’m not repulsive. That was the point of becoming anorexic in the first place, right?

April 2nd, 7:00 AM

I’ve wondered why my parents and friends (Sam mostly) haven’t written. I wouldn’t be surprised if my parents forgot I was here. I HATE that. When I get out, my goal won’t be to be the most popular one in school. It will be the most popular one at home….. I was walking in the hallway today. On the Receptionist’s desk was a pamphlet for this hospital, an advertisement for the people who stops by to see their loved ones who are patients. It had the “hallmark card” kind of family on it. The family I always wanted but never got. I didn’t even have a family, really. I had shelter, food (even if it was a lack of) and clothes but the pain from being anorexic replaced the love. And your parents are supposed to love you a lot. See how much pain that is?

May 2nd, 6:28 PM

I know I can get better. There’s no “if” factor anymore. When I came here, I was at rock bottom. I was like the words of David Bowie’s “Changes”: “And these Children that you spit on, as they try to change their worlds, are immune to your consultations. They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.” But I see now that there’s nothing more to this anorexia than to be liked. The problem is I didn’t like myself. I blamed my parents for my problems. And that’s when I hit the bottom. My parents are happy the way they are. And the people at school’s lives aren’t going to change because I’m skinny. I won’t change. But the reasons I am skinny will change me.I started hating myself when I wasn’t good enough, when I’m anorexic. And I know a way to change that.

May 3rd, 11:27 AM

“How are you today?”

“I’m…better,” I say. I’m really talking for the first time.

He scribbles down on his notepad. It’s probably something I say. Or that I’m actually speaking, like you see on the Cheez-It commercials where they wait for the cheese to mature, proving that they’re ready.

“Tell me how you are better,” he says.

Everything spills out to its entirety: from my parents to David Bowie, and all in between. How I made a pact with Sam, how I wake up screaming at night. I talked and talked and he listened. I even talked about how much I hated it here, including him. He flinched a little, but I’ve never had someone listen to all of my problems. I didn’t even have to talk fast, like I did before to try to get as much in as people would listen to.

“Another way I’m better,” I say with a smile, “this.”

I think this is the first time in a while that I’m really genuine. And I can see that his eyes light up, just a bit, too.

June 18th, 10:22 PM

It’s been over a month since I’ve written in this. I haven’t really needed to lately. New friends I met have filled the hole of nothingness from when I first got here.

Karen and Joanah have actually become very close. And I have other friends, like Paul who’s in for drug abuse. And Jerry who is in for anger issues like when he used to take it out on his mom and sister. In a way, I feel like their role model. I feel like I’m almost an employee here. I help out in group discussions, and express ways I got better to plant a seed in the heads of people so they can improve, just like I did. Just like how I can finally leave today. Anyways, life is too short to be angry all the time, or high all the time, so you don’t know what time is passing. In my case, it was pain all the time. When I tell my story to the group, and hope they can some day say this too, no matter what, I always end with: “Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.”

______________________

Reilly Haskins is a soon-to-be college student from Connecticut writing in her free time. She is a mathematician with a deep love of short narratives.

Bingxin, the distinguished writer, poet, translator, and social activist, was born Xie Wanying on Oct.5, 1900, in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, to the family of a patriotic naval officer. During the May Fourth Movement, a patriotic student movement against foreign aggression and for new culture, she was a student at Yanjing University, was elected secretary of the Students’ Union, and took an active part in publicity work for the Beijing Federation of Women Students. Greatly inspired by the movement, she began contributing to the newspaper Chenbao (Morning Paper). After she graduated from Yanjing University in 1923 with a Bachelor’s Degree, she went to the United States to further her study in literature at Wellesley College and finished her postgraduate study with a Master’s Degree. Her M.A. Thesis was An English Translation and Edition of the Poems of Lady Li I-an (1926), a distinguished woman poet of the Sung Dynasty. In 1926, Bingxin returned to China to teach Chinese Literature at Yanjing University, a post she held until 1936. In 1929, she married Wu Wenzao, one of the founders of anthropology in China and widely respected in that field.

Bingxin never stopped writing. Her essays and journals on her life experience were collected and published in 1920s under the title of “Letters to Young Readers,” followed by “More Letters to Young Readers” in the 1950s and “Still More Letters to Young Readers” in the 1970s. Her works were very influential and became the foundation of modern children’s literature in China. In 1947, Bingxin, with her husband, traveled to Japan with an invitation from Tokyo University, where she taught New Chinese Literature as the first foreign female professor. She returned to China in 1951 and made a few more trips to Europe, America, and Africa to promote international cultural exchange.

In 1980, Bingxin was diagnosed with cerebral thrombosis and later bone fracture, which caused her to be paralyzed. Yet under the spirit of “Life Begins at 80,” she relearned how to walk, talk, and write and she was extremely prolific in this period. She died on Feb 28th, 1999, in the hospital in Beijing, and was honored as “the century-old lady.”

[source: bingxin.org]

5

Darkness,

How to paint it?

Deep deep down in the heart,

Deep deep down in the universe,

The resting place after all glory.

6

Mirror —

Look into it face-to-face,

Actually feels awkward,

Isn’t flipping it better?

11

The boundless mystery,

Where to find it?

After smile,

Before words,

Here is the boundless mystery.

155

The white flower eclipses the green leaf,

Strong wine doesn’t beat light tea.

33

The flower in the corner!

When you appreciate yourself alone,

The world becomes smaller.

______________________

5, 6, 11, and 155 are from A Myriad of Stars. 33 is from Spring Water. Both of them are miscellaneous collections of Bingxin’s poems.

A note on the photos: Wang Binggen is a nationally prominent writer, the president of Bingxin Literature Research Center, and the founder of Bingxin Literature Museum. Graduated from Nanjing University with a major in Chinese, he has devoted most of his time studying Bingxin and her work.

*

Translator and photographer Miranda Jingqiong Yang, a student at Wellesley College, is from Ningbo, China.

]]>https://frankmattermag.com/2017/06/28/translations-of-bingxin-and-photos-from-fuzhou-by-miranda-jingqiong-yang/feed/0Processed with VSCO with a6 presetfrankmattermagThe Valise, by Michel Lambert. Translated from the French by Paul Curtis Dawhttps://frankmattermag.com/2016/06/30/the-valise-by-michel-lambert-translated-from-the-french-by-paul-curtis-daw/
https://frankmattermag.com/2016/06/30/the-valise-by-michel-lambert-translated-from-the-french-by-paul-curtis-daw/#respondThu, 30 Jun 2016 18:57:00 +0000http://frankmattermag.com/?p=772Continue reading →]]>They came by to pick up Bob around four. He lived in a three-room apartment above a pharmacy, across from the high school where they had all known each other and where he was now teaching Latin and Greek. His first name was really Gustave, but the name had always horrified him. He was also horrified by machines and cars, and he didn’t know how to drive.

Like every time when the old gang got together, Bob had invented a new character. This time it involved a strong Russian accent, a polka-dot shirt, and bright yellow artificial flower pinned to a sweater vest over his heart. And he was limping assertively, thrusting his rigid leg ahead of him.

With its windows closed, the apartment smelled stale, reeking of cigarette smoke and bedlinen changed no more than monthly. It must have been days since the dishes had been washed and an eternity since any rag had freshened up the windowpanes. A ray of sunlight accentuated the layer of dust on the acajou coffee table.

Nicolas took a few hesitant steps and then asked abruptly, “Do you know who Estelle has invited?”

“A magician, I believe.”

“I hope his act won’t be total crap. Do you remember the juggler? An absolute disaster.”

Every year, following the reunion dinner, a performer came to entertain the group. Estelle, who had gone into media relations, was in charge of booking the talent. One year they had the pleasure of seeing a fire eater, another time an impressionist, still another, a stripper…

Marie-Jeanne shrugged in reply. She went off to station herself at one of the windows overlooking the boulevard and very quickly seemed lost in her musings.

“The old school building hasn’t changed,” she murmured a moment later, as if to herself.

While she was contemplating the gray stone edifice where they had spent their youth, Nicolas took it upon himself to air out the room by throwing open the other window. Along with the fresh air, a languid buzz of traffic penetrated the space. It was a lovely August Sunday, hot and dry, and several clouds that resembled cabin cruisers were floating across the sky.

All of a sudden, Nicolas regretted having been such a bad audience for Bob. And so cold toward Marie-Jeanne. He approached her, intending to say that this wasn’t easy for either of them, but she cut him off in a low, calm voice:

“Please, I don’t want to hear it.”

Just then, as if coming to their aid, a barrage of noises invaded the room, the ice cream man’s jingle, the loudspeaker of an excursion boat on the Meuse, a car horn. Then a lame person’s faltering footsteps, followed by a throat-clearing that signaled an entrance.

The next moment, a strong aroma of cologne pervaded the room.
Marie-Jeanne turned around and laughingly exclaimed, “What an old floozy!”

When Nicolas looked around in turn, he saw that Bob was leaning against the door frame and sizing up both of them with a malicious look. His slicked-back hair made his thinning temples look paler than the rest of his face.

“Are you all right?”

“Awaitink your orrrders, sirrr,” replied Bob with a military salute.

It took them an absurdly long time to go down the stairs. In deference to his stiff leg, Bob paused on every step. In the street, a similar drama. Likewise while getting into the car, parked opposite the theater.

And the whole way, he subjected them to his accent, thick enough to cut with a knife. Marie-Jeanne, who’d gotten in next to him in the back seat, defected to his side: she, too, was rolling her “R”s, poking fun at herself, at Bob, and at the romanticized memories they were trying to rekindle.

At the wheel, Nicolas was silent. From time to time, he glanced at the rear view mirror. What he saw seemed to him more and more incongruous, as well as vaguely indecent, a man and a woman intoxicated before they’d even started drinking.

He pitied Marie-Jeanne for her desperate efforts to keep up appearances, just as he’d pitied Bob several minutes earlier.

When they arrived, about ten cars were already parked in the shade of the tall pines in the lot opposite the hotel and its restaurant. The sun was still beating down, but a light wind made the temperature more bearable. The scent of pine resin filled the air, and the ground was thickly strewn with little rust-colored needles that made it feel spongy.

On the terrace, hands were raised in greeting, and for several seconds there was a clamor of welcoming shouts. Marie-Jeanne planted herself between the two men and gave an arm to each of them. Together, they ascended the gently sloping path at a pace dictated by Bob’s gimpy leg.

Estelle was coming to meet them. She was a sumptuously beautiful woman with thick black hair, tanned from head to toe. Heavily perfumed. In stiletto heels. She kissed them one after another in her effusively demonstrative manner.

On the terrace, there were fresh outpourings of camaraderie. And yet, from one year to the next, they were gradually, almost imperceptibly, losing their enthusiasm. Bob carved out a measure of success for himself, but the encores, the exclamations no longer had the same ardor, nor did the faces reflect the same indulgent pleasure they once had.

The cocktail hour, interrupted by their arrival, resumed its course. The terrace was vast, sunlit, and redolent with the aromas of cooking. During each lull in the conversation, the tinkling of a nearby fountain could be heard, along with the twittering of birds.

Nicolas removed his jacket and proceeded toward the buffet, which was laid out beneath a striped canvas awning. A glass of champagne in his hand, he made the rounds of the group, politely asking each one how things were going, the job, the kids…

“And you?” they asked him.

“Oh, me, no problems.”

Soon a knot of people formed, and the conversation turned to those who were absent. Certain ones had moved away, some were on vacation, this one had lost his job, that one was battling cancer. Someone quickly counted the attendees. Including partners, their numbers had fallen by half since the first reunion.

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?” declaimed the bard of the group.

During this time a team of servers busied themselves with rolling up the awning and carrying in the trestle tables. In a matter of minutes, the dinner table was ready.

Bob sat across from Nicolas, Marie-Jeanne beside Bob. Next to Nicolas was Estelle. One strap of her dress was continually slipping off her shoulder. From time to time he took it upon himself to raise it back into place, teasing her all the while about her tanning sessions. Out of the corner of his eye, he surveyed Marie-Jeanne, who, between slightly forced bursts of laughter, glanced furtively at him.

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?” reprised the misty-eyed bard at regular intervals.

Just as regularly, Bob would stand up and make his way around the table, hobbling outlandishly and pausing to banter with one person or another.

“Terrrible!” he exclaimed.

In addition to which, he would slide his hand under his sweater at the level of his heart and mimic an intolerable pain. Seconds later, a jet of water would spurt from the artificial flower, dousing whoever had rushed to his aid.

Nicolas wondered how long his friend would keep up the badly mangled accent, the lurching gait, the yellow plastic flower and the rest — at what moment he would tire of it and pack it all in. He pictured the cramped and badly maintained apartment where Bob lived, the neon pharmacy sign, the boulevard that separated him from the school campus and his lost youth.

“Why are you so sad?” Estelle asked him, putting her hand on his.
Nicolas withdrew her hand, emptied his glass, and poured himself another that he drained in one gulp. He finally turned toward his neighbor and looked directly into her eyes. “I’m thinking of Bob. I’m thinking of Marie-Jeanne. Of everyone here. Of you. Why didn’t you ever marry? …But what am I saying?”

Pinching his cheek between his thumb and his index finger, he said, “It’s made of latex, six hours of make-up work. Really, I’m having insane amounts of fun. You don’t believe me?” He pretended to tear off an imaginary mask and replaced his severe expression with a look of glee.

Estelle let out a hearty laugh that made her breasts quiver, but then she became serious again. She appraised him amicably.
“If I understand correctly, you’re the happiest man in the world.”
“Exactly. The happiest in the world, in fact the happiest of all time. An unbeatable ranking in the Guinness Book of World Records. Your perfume is intoxicating,” he added between whiffs.

Without warning, he pushed his chair back and got up to stretch his legs on the terrace while waiting for the servers to bring out the ornate layer cake. He rested his elbows on the railing, his back to the gathering. Night was falling. The green of the trees was no longer truly green, the blue of the sky no longer truly blue. And none of the colors they had once known, and loved so much, ever came back in quite the same shade.

When Nicolas returned to his place, a guest at the other end of the table had just started singing a Boris Vian song, and several others joined in at the chorus. As he observed the faces that were becoming more cadaverous, more veiny, jowlier or pastier with each passing year, Nicolas killed off what remained of a bottle that was within reach.

His gaze rested on Marie-Jeanne, who was trying valiantly to attune her voice to the chorus. Bob had placed his arm on her shoulder, and the two of them seemed to have a marvelous rapport.
Estelle tried again. “You’re jealous?” she murmured in a maternal voice. “But you know very well he only loves boys!”
Nicolas shrugged.

After coffee, the liqueurs began to circulate, and in imitation of Bob, who was more out of control than ever, the other guests tossed their empty glasses over their shoulders in the Russian manner. Soon there was a frenzy, off went a glass, and it smashed, off went another, and it smashed, then off went another and still another, and smash and smash.

It was almost completely dark when a man in a smoking jacket fetched up on the terrace with an old cardboard valise. The lanterns had been lit. The waiters were mindlessly sweeping up the broken glass. It was the hour when drunkenness devolved into inane laughter, reveries, and whispered confidences. Everyone seemed to be wondering what this guy was going to do.

Estelle got up and introduced him:

“The fabulous Magic John!”

The man saluted the audience and was met with discreet applause. The dining table was removed, and the chairs were arranged in two rows facing the performer.

He clapped his hands to capture everyone’s attention. With an air of great mystery, he withdrew from his pocket a small metallic framework that unfolded into a table, on which he placed his valise. To fresh applause, he affectionately contemplated the valise, suddenly brandished a key produced between his fingers God knows how, and inserted it into the lock.

He could be seen exerting a great effort for a minute or two, putting on a sheepish expression, and soliciting assistance.
Nicolas leaned forward and whispered in Bob’s ear:

“Go down there and squirt him.”

“No morre water, lamebrrain.”

Since no one could manage to open the valise, Magic John shook his head in disgust and tossed the key into the darkness. When mutterings arose, he calmed them with a gesture. Silence restored, he snapped his fingers and, as if miraculously, the lid popped open.

After savoring his success, he removed from the valise a small board on which about ten animals were depicted in a stylized manner. His eyes settled on a timid redheaded woman sitting in the second row. He asked her to choose one of the animals and hold it in her mind.

“Now clap your hands three times,” he ordered.

Once she had done so, he announced to the gathering that the woman had chosen the tortoise.

“How did you know?” she asked in astonishment.

“Ah, well…”

About ten tricks later, Magic John waved to the group one last time, stowed his accessories back in the cardboard valise, and set it in a corner at the top of the staircase leading down to the parking lot.

After a quick rearrangement, the terrace became an improvised dance floor where couples moved in close embrace to the rhythm of slow dances. Nicolas went to sit beside Bob, who handed him a flask of vodka. Nicolas took a swig straight from the flask.

In a kind of fog, he let his eyes follow the movement of the dancers. His gaze met Marie-Jeanne’s and registered the defiant smile she threw back at him.

When the song ended, and as another was beginning, she left her partner and walked briskly toward Nicolas.

“May I have the next one?” she asked in a determined voice.
He stood up and took her in his arms. She pressed against him and leaned her head on his shoulder. Nicolas could not keep from breathing in the scent of her very fine, silky blond hair, just as he had secretly done the very first time, thirty years earlier, when they were still kids.

As the songs followed one another, they continued to glide across the dance floor, tightly enlaced. Nicolas wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, except that this was tougher than he’d anticipated. Just as he had pitied Bob, then Marie-Jeanne, he was now, thanks to the alcohol, pitying himself.

Kissing her, he wondered whether she wanted to come to his aid or instead to exploit him in her triumphant way, unless for her, too, this was tougher than she’d expected.

They ended their long Hollywood kiss to cheers and raillery.

“Still madly in love!” came the shouts from all sides.

Nicolas let go of Marie-Jeanne, and they stared at each other for awhile. He stepped out of the circle as another dancing partner took his place.

Unsteady on his feet, he shuffled off toward the stairs, snatching up Magic John’s valise as he went by, as if by inadvertence, and made his way down to the parking lot. Beyond it lay the dark realm of the forest. The air had cooled, but pockets of intense heat persisted here and there. A quasi-religious silence prevailed, and the waves of music rolling off the terrace barely carried beyond the forest edge.

Nicolas sat down on a stump.

After an indeterminate time, he set out again, crossed a clearing, and walked as far as a small pond covered with greenish algae. His breathing grew more and more labored as he advanced, and finally it became so noisy that no other sound reached him.

He began swinging the valise back and forth, preparing to launch it into the stagnant water, when suddenly a hand blocked his movement and made him totter. Losing his balance, he fell to the ground. For a moment, he lay there without stirring, his eyes wide open in the unfathomable night. Someone leaned over him. He recognized Estelle’s perfume.

“What were you doing?” she asked, gasping for breath.

It wasn’t really a question, but rather an amused observation, by a woman as tipsy as he, about an unhinged act at the end of an evening’s celebration.

She helped him to his feet, but she herself was quite unsteady. They had entangled themselves so thoroughly that they ended up on the ground again.

“When I think of that poor devil looking everywhere for it!”

She chortled good-naturedly, and Nicolas joined in her laughter. He took her in his arms, told her she smelled good, and ran his lips over the copper-colored skin of her neck, her shoulders, the swell of her breasts.

“Oh, Bob’s stiff appendage isn’t the only one!” she said in a throaty voice, while he was caressing her and unzipping her dress. “Here’s a little leg that’s gone stiff.” Later, she walked away carrying the valise, her figure perched on her toweringly high heels and fitfully illuminated by the milky moonlight. As he watched her, it seemed to Nicolas that the distant music was beginning to keep time with her pace.

He spotted Bob, who was crossing the clearing without limping, his hands in his pockets. In the end, his friend had not managed to keep up the pretense. Nicolas overtook him. They went on in silence for a hundred yards.

“I have to tell you…” Nicolas began, embarrassed.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing important.”

They walked back to the parking lot. His valise in hand, Magic John came down the stairs from the terrace and headed toward an old white Peugeot. Nicolas couldn’t resist teasing him.

“I see you finally found it.”

“Yes, as if by magic,” answered the man, with a thin smile.

On the terrace, it was time for parting hugs. Those who had come a long distance would be staying in the hotel. Others were preparing to take to the road. You could already hear car doors slamming shut. Marie-Jeanne was still dancing, whirling around in solitude. When she saw Nicolas, she went up to him and ostentatiously inclined her head.

“My dear!” she exclaimed. “A last dance?”

“There’s no more music,” said Nicolas patiently.

“Please!”

“There’s no more music,” Nicolas repeated.

He noticed that Estelle was looking at him. Her expression was tinged with complicity and with an emotion he could not have named, something animal-like and joyous, and also a little desperate, the way their embrace had been.

He smiled at her, looked away, and said to Marie-Jeanne, “Let’s go.”

With rapid strides, he reached the parking lot, followed by Bob and Marie-Jeanne. The first cars were pulling away, projecting dazzling shafts of light. Through lowered windows, their friends shouted at them, “See you next year!”

“See you next year!” they replied.

A half hour later, as they entered the slumbering neighborhoods of the city, Marie-Jeanne asked Nicolas, as if discussing a routine domestic matter, “So when are you leaving?”

“We’ll go home and I’ll pack my things.”

In the rear view mirror, he saw her turn slowly toward Bob and hesitate a moment before saying in a ghostly voice:

“Nicolas told me this morning that he’s leaving me.”

Bob’s thunderstruck expression was reflected in the mirror. He posed his very thin, practically nonexistent lips on Marie-Jeanne’s pale cheek, and each of them curled up silently in a corner.

Nicolas mused that Marie-Jeanne had done no better than Bob at staying in character until the end. And that in a year’s time their relationship would have no more substance than the snows of yesteryear. Yes, their love had melted like snow in the sunlight, but there’d been no sun for a long time. Nothing but a persistent little rain that would keep falling for some time to come.

Whatever they did.

Suddenly, as they crossed the last bridge, Nicolas realized that once again he wouldn’t really leave. Out of cowardice? Or inertia? Because of the children? He thought again of the valise, the greenish pond, the magician, Estelle’s perfume, and of this night when she, too, had begun to melt.

He parked the car in front of the theater. The three of them got out, crossed the street and headed toward the boulevard where Bob lived. On the left was the high school of their youth. On the right, the pharmacy sign. In the distance, a couple stepped onto the footbridge that straddled the river.

Marie-Jeanne yawned. “What time is it?” she asked.

“Three a.m.,” said Nicolas.

“Today is another day,” said Bob, and he began to sob.

*

The original version of this story appeared in the author’s collection, Une touche de désastre, (c) 2006 by Editions du Rocher.

Michel Lambert is a Belgian author and journal editor who has published four novels, eight story collections and a novella. He is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the foremost prize in Belgian francophone letters, the Prix Rossel; the 2006 short story prize of the Société des Gens de Lettres de France for Une touche de désastre; and the 2006 triennial prize of the Belgian francophone community, awarded for the best novel published within a three-year span. In 1992 he co-founded the Prix Renaissance de la Nouvelle, which has regularly honored preeminent writers of short fiction in French. His books, or in some cases individual stories, have been translated into fifteen languages. A story of his appears in the anthology, Best European Fiction 2016 (Dalkey Archive Press: London/Dublin/Victoria, TX, 2015). In 2013, his oeuvre was examined at length by Emilie Gäbele in Michel Lambert: les âmes felées (Michel Lambert: Bewildered Souls).

Translator Paul Curtis Daw is a lawyer-turned-translator based in Colorado and London. His translation of Evelyne Trouillot’s novel, Memory at Bay, was released last year by the University of Virginia Press. His translations of stories and other texts from France, Haiti, Belgium, Quebec and Reunion have been published frequently in Words Without Borders and have also appeared in Subtropics, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, carte blanche, K1N, nowhere, the Asymptote blog, Best European Fiction 2016, and Best European Fiction 2017 (forthcoming, 2016). He serves as an officer and director of the American Literary Translators Association and belongs to the Translators Association (UK).

]]>https://frankmattermag.com/2016/06/30/the-valise-by-michel-lambert-translated-from-the-french-by-paul-curtis-daw/feed/0The ValisefrankmattermagRelax, Pay Attention – A Walk in the Park with Mark Rudman, by Matt Coreyhttps://frankmattermag.com/2016/06/30/relax-pay-attention-a-walk-in-the-park-with-mark-rudman/
https://frankmattermag.com/2016/06/30/relax-pay-attention-a-walk-in-the-park-with-mark-rudman/#respondThu, 30 Jun 2016 18:53:56 +0000http://frankmattermag.com/?p=781Continue reading →]]>The following conversation is from a series of interviews Matt Corey, a writer who lives in New York, conducted with Mark Rudman.

*

Once the weather got nice in New York, working in an office got to be like an imprisonment. Fitting then that a dialogue in nearby Central Park was spurred on by the Nietzsche quote, “the prison house of language,” leading to the response, reply by Wittgenstein, back to Goethe’s attempt to reverse The Book of Genesis—beginning the history of man with action rather than “the word,” a few chance encounters, and final diagnosis on what actually motivates somebody to create. How to stay loose and not adhere to a fixed form or way of seeing, and conversely, how to avoid beat-like “babbling.”

In forty-five minutes time it was quite an amount of terrain to cross.

Matt: Why are the simple questions always the most difficult ones to answer?

Mark: It’s a trial right. You’ve got me there. It’s not always. But this brings me to a subject that is a perpetual torment. And that is something that relates to the indelible phrase that Nietzsche wrote in The Will to Power – the phrase “the prison house of language.” I think that I wrote an entire book called The Sentence when I was about 23 in response to that phrase about being trapped inside language.

Matt: Mark, your mention of that prison house reminds me of a quote from a song of Bob Dylan’s I know you’re very fond of – “The Hurricane.”

Mark: How so, Matt?

Matt: The lines “now all the criminals with their coats and their ties / are free to drink martinis and watch the sunrise.”

Mark: “While Ruben sits like Buddha in a ten foot cell / an innocent man in a living hell.”

You make me feel so scholastic here. And that I should go see what Christopher Ricks wrote about those lines. Because I have a feeling that you’ve hit on something which is somewhat of a paradox in that these may be among the most imprecise lines that I can think of by Dylan. Imprecise and also stretching the case and I don’t even know that Ricks can defend an innocent man in a living hell as being poetry or of even being good.

Matt: I agree they’re not good. But I do think they’re effective.

Mark: I agree with you there. In fact the concept of being effective is one of those things that can release you from “the prison house of language” in the sense that you can be effective through action.

Matt: Doesn’t that bring us to the core of your philosophy that you reiterate time and again and demonstrate in so many of your poems?

Mark: Thanks, Matt, for recognizing that. It has been an obsessive theme since I, well, late in my late reading of Wittgenstein discovered that he ended his final book On Certainty as though somebody should have re-translated it and put a “UN” in front of it in some kind of double quotes or brackets to give a little winking pun to the reader because he’s writing on “certainty” that it’s a book about things that we can be sure of, or certain of.

Matt: But you’ve really taken that idea and moved it and used it, and really in multitudinous ways.

Mark: Prompt me.

Matt: Let’s see. In your essay — – you point to Harry Hotspur’s speech when he comes back from his first big battle and he describes it – you say that this passage points toward the idea of free verse which you also equate with action. Do you mean action as against meditation?

Mark: No, Matt, I think I mean in apposition to meditation. I think the idea of meditation and action and introspection and whatever the converse of that is – does introspection have an antonym? Among the greatest and most challenging problems that we have and also allow us to – hold on – the truth is, Matt, what I find most mind-boggling about contemporary – I wouldn’t call it “literary culture” but, you know, all of the disciplines that address issues of this kind – philosophy, or psychology, even poetry – I find it almost staggering that so little attention has been paid to this moment in Wittgenstein’s work but precisely not because it was Wittgenstein who said it but because he got the lines from Goethe and that Goethe saw fit –

Matt: Oh, oh yeah – you’ve alluded to this quite frequently. In The Millennium Hotel for starters, don’t you have a note to this effect?

Mark: I think so. I know that in the prose that I’ve written I’ve never quite managed to get to that place or that the discussion around that matter of action and introspection has somehow always been put aside because other things are more prominent and this deserves its own space, its own table, its own seminar…

Matt: Its own cable show even, right?

Mark: Yes. Why would Goethe go to such lengths to simply reverse The Book of Genesis? In Faust, I assume that this is not a moment of irony. I don’t think that he’s – he was capable of joking but I doubt that he was joking when he changed “in the beginning was the word” to “in the beginning there’s the deed.” And somehow the repercussions, are really, well, first uncountable, perhaps unmiserable, because we’ve entered a time where people resort to explanations. And shy away from talking about actions or “the deed” as if that that were a more shallow approach.

Matt: Well, it’s more on the surface.

Mark: I’m standing next to a young fellow on a scooter. I’m going to ask him what he thinks. What do you think is more important, doing something or thinking about it?

What would you rather do? Do something or think about doing something? If you don’t answer, I’m going to have to ask your mom.

Mother: I think they would rather do something.

Mark: Why do you think so?

Mother: Instant gratification. What is this for?

Since we’re in Paris, and having coffee in memory of Julio Cortazar and Simone de Beauvoir and some other of our dead friends, I think it’s appropriate to be in the street, the way that they would advocate and we’re sitting next to an attractive young woman who’s reading some books that lead me to think she may have more to say on this subject than you or I – “Israel and the Politics of Jewish Identity.” I don’t know what I’m going to ask but I’ll think of something.

We don’t want to take too much of your time, or interrupt your work, but maybe a fraction of the two minutes will leak into it or perhaps there’s some correspondence that sometimes happens. Because we’re both puzzling over why there’s never been much interest in the culture at large or you might call the intellectual culture in these questions – actually they weren’t questions they were statements – or propositions that Wittgenstein raised in his last book On Certainty which he derived from the beginning of Goethe’s Faust, where Goethe reverses the beginning, the sentence that in a way begins human history – at least from our perspective, however biased that is, in that he changes “in the beginning was the word” to “in the beginning was the deed.” And since we live in this culture where when people do things whether it’s the murder at Virginia Tech this week or some form of abuse that one of us has endured over the past few days or ill treatment someone is likely to respond not to what happened but to the fact that they had polio when they were a child or some aspect of their history. It seems like a rather crucial matter, and we just wondered if this sparked any spontaneous response on your part.

Woman: Um, empathizing with the perpetrators of violence, you mean?

Mark: No, the idea that there’s more emphasis on – in thinking and as I say in sort of the intellectual establishment you might say, the university, literature, I’m talking about language as an isolated phenomenon on motivations, and then of course the Freudian tradition carried through and diffused through so many rivulets. And that most of them seem to focus on not things that happened or might happen but on things surrounding them, circumstances or history – your own history – and I find this curious – the idea that the focus on the idea of an unconscious, which Sartre said, since we’re sitting at the d’ Van Gogh – he said that there can’t be an unconscious because it’s already conscious. Just to say that you’re studying political science and that’s involved with action. I find it a conundrum as to why this culture seems to be so involved in the matters surrounding things rather than the things, or the things through which people are defined. Which is not what they think or what they intend. If you’d agree with that.

Woman: I do think I agree with that. I guess I’m also a product of the culture so my response is I don’t know American culture, the intellectual culture, whichever culture you want, so, yeah, so I think the reason for that emphasis is because to understand any action you have to understand – you have to put it in context to understand the ___ of somebody’s history, their past experiences, and what they’ve been through, because that’s what shapes them, what determines how they act, so I think you can’t sort of understand isolated episodes without understanding…..

Mark: Wait, wait yes, I agree with that 100 percent. But I wasn’t necessarily referring to understanding so much as dealing with the reality —-

Woman: Do you have a concrete example of what you mean by that?

Mark: (to both of us) I’m characteristically drawing a blank when somebody asks me an intelligent question that pierces through the fog of my own more poetic way of apprehending things. But I can’t refer to anything that’s happening so much as the idea as say that Aristotle when he talks about the nature of theater and stuff that they talk about action, they talk about what happens and what you can see and what’s visible. So, it’s a little bit of a different twist. And you went right to the idea of understanding, which is part of the question and part of the problem. Again, but then I’m referring to something in an aesthetic realm, as opposed to, and that’s in a way why I found it difficult to address this because if someone asks what you ask I feel immediately trapped with a problem of it being on the surface. But then why would Wittgenstein finish all his work on this quotation.

Woman: I think the question you’re asking is why they talk about, they don’t talk about an action, they talk about the motivation, the intention so much, the invisible, rather than the visible…

Mark: The invisible is interesting. But that’s also more subtle than I was thinking…

Woman: Well, I feel like one reason why I talk about the visible is that it’s – I guess that if it’s distasteful, or some sort of morality, and morally repugnant, then we don’t actually want to focus on….

Mark: I’m talking about it though on any level. It doesn’t have to be anything with any baggage of an action that has anything dark or anything more than walking out the door, as opposed to not walking out the door.

Woman: I think if there’s any visible act it’s a manifestation of what’s invisible and that’s what sort of brings it to light and you can’t really understand it. However, I’m talking about understanding.

Mark: That’s brilliant. Do you think that it’s possible if an action – a physical action – is a manifestation of something invisible – okay – that’s much better than I phrased it – then the action may incorporate a totality of the thinking.

Woman: I don’t think any action can ever incorporate the totality of the invisible because it’s only a portion of what gets transmitted.

Mark: Only a portion. Sure.

Woman: So, I don’t think it’s….that’s why we have a metaphysical speculation because we know that there’s a larger invisible reality that we can’t comprehend. It’s incomprehensible to us (incomprehensible).

Mark: I’m the one that’s supposed to be Hamlet. Hamletizing…you’re the political scientist. I mean, yes, I agree with you I’m just poking into this and it began with that phrase of Nietzsche’s “the prison house of language” so that I think what Wittgenstein was doing was saying that to get out of the prison house of language where you’re trapped by expression, syntax, that action (in a sublimer sense) might be more of an appeal or a clue to some truth.

Woman: I don’t think it can, because we can only talk about action through language itself so just even talking about action is unseparated from the language and syntax and the expression; so however you make sense of it it’s filtered through your concept of language. So that to an extent limits even when you perceive an action, unless it’s through art or poetry where you try to break it down to language and try to capture reality (—-) but not expressed through the logic of language…then maybe….you have to express what you’ve observed.

Mark: I think that since I spend my life doing that, I’m interested in this other avenue or I’m interested in the idea of art that is in action, which a lot of great art is including Homer, a lot of Shakespeare if you read the plays, that’s more what I was thinking. Brilliant.

Matt: I guess she showed you.

Mark: She did indeed. Although I think that she was coming at it from a radically different angle than I was. I think that I meant it more metaphorically, or thinking more concretely about my own experience of people explaining away things, or using someone’s situation as a way of justifying or ameliorating the effect of what they’ve done.

Matt: If I can stop laughing I’ll go on because by talking about the “prison house of language” and all this business of action you make me think of Hamlet saying that “Denmark’s a prison” and then that nothing’s either good or bad but the thinking makes it so, which opens up the whole domain of subjectivity, or you might say, that it is a forerunner in terms of mental life of relativity.

Mark: Yeah, Matt. It reminds me of the famous case of Eliot and the essay on Hamlet, which is really quite a challenge to get your mind around, in the sense that Eliot goads us because he’s too smart to be trapped in a specious argument and in that essay, also by coining the phrase “objective correlative” and calling the play Hamlet a failure, an artistic failure, he issued an invitation to countless misinterpretations or misunderstandings of something that he may not have fully understood. I say “fully” because he did right his thesis on appearance and reality and the philosopher F.H. Bradley so he’d given a lot of thought to these matters. But I don’t think that Eliot’s domain was that of “action.” He was very much a man of the sidelines. Ultimately. And emotionally. Which becomes completely clear as his poetry develops and he gets to the phase of The Four Quartets where meditation replaces the inaction of his characters, or persona. If you think about it, the action in Eliot’s great poetry which you know that I hold in the highest esteem is carried out by the elements in some sense. Or elemental forces. Like the tiger in The Wasteland and certainly the great apocalyptic ending.

But to call Hamlet a failure is without question I think to judge it by a pre-existing standard which he invokes for his convenience at the moment. He similarly disposed of Blake’s prophetic books in this manner and I think he called Blake a “minor prophet,” something in that vein. Those books are immensely problematical and if he had used the objective correlative with regard to the The Book of Jerusalem he had a case there for it, not “working,” in the way that previous poems in English worked. On the other hand, the poem holds an enduring fascination for me. And maybe this leads to another example that hearkens back to the problem of this prison house of language because in a lot of the cases that have come up, everybody is in some way exaggerating or sacrificing precision to make a point. And every time that happens the language and the concept stray further from the truth.

Matt: What do you mean by “the truth?” What’s “the truth?”

Mark: The possibility of possibility.

Matt: Hmm. That’s…kind of an amazing comeback.

Mark: That’s because it’s not my idea.

Matt: Whose idea is it?

Mark: Kierkegaard’s.

Matt: So, you have the passion for philosophy. You think in a philosophical manner, in varying ways, and yet you argue against what you might call, “philosophical poetry,” or fiction.

Mark: You mean, like “the novel of ideas” as well.

Matt: Yeah.

Mark: Once again I think I owe some of this to other minds. There was a renowned philosopher named Martin Heidegger who in one of his great books of the several of them I thought were great – many I haven’t read – and some I haven’t liked – but Heidegger makes a veritably ferocious argument against the so-called “philosophical” approach of Rilke in The Duino Elegies, as against the, you might say, realized potential of language and image that he finds in the poetry of Georg Trakl.

Matt: You mean, Heidegger didn’t like Rilke?

Mark: I think he didn’t like certain things that Rilke did. I would wager that he liked the ( —- ). I myself love The Duino Elegies. I really don’t think about them from an ideological point of view. A poem to me is language, rhythm, music, cadence, syntax, structure, and these poems have a way of moving that brings me to a pitch of ecstasy that I’m sure it did Rilke. I find them utterly exhilarating, like the line “when the wind full of infinite spaces / when the wind gnaws out our face.”

If Heidegger finds a line like that specious or even pretentious I couldn’t care less because he’s writing poetry. And he’s using a certain kind of abstract language because he’s nearing the end of his life and he wants to say everything in one poem.

Matt: Why do you say that you’re always surprised when someone appears to have grasped your intentions or subliminal intentions in your poems and especially in the books that constitute The Rider Quintet.

Mark: I think that that’s another example of a kind of imprecision – I’m overstressing one thing to really say something else that’s much simpler and contains all of it which is gratitude. I feel grateful and moved when people “get it.” And by “get it” I just mean get what I was after, nothing that can’t be expressed in a sentence, as in what is for me an indelible insight that Bruce Murphy made in that essay he wrote on Provoked in Venice when he hones in on the moment in the section called “Not Normalissimo” when the figure of the poet remembers arriving at a party in New York as a teenager, he’s living in Utah, going to high school in Arizona; he’s not really involved in that kind of community, but these are friends of his parents who were sort of in loco parentis for him who will be at the party and he shakes hands with a blind man who then utters his name.

And when I put the book together I put that moment in there wondering if anyone would see that this was it. This was what I wanted. To be identified. And again I was touched that the man could identify me in this way and also there was a tinge of enthusiasm in his voice. There’s an element of superstition in this – when a blind person, symbolically or historically, right? The blind sage looks at someone and sees some quality that other people have missed because he’s not distracted by all of the thrills of the visual field. He doesn’t know what kind of tie he’s wearing.

Matt: And he could be easily wrong.

Mark: He could be wrong. But I never forget when I’m writing these things that are grounded in experience or incidents or events that actually occurred just as Apollinaire said, that every poem of mine is a record of an event in my life. Firstly, it isn’t any kind of literal transcription, and second, anything that I write has to be seen as an act of invention and imagination. I try not to trick the reader and play games but it has to be seen that way. And curiously, a lot of people always want to talk to me after I give a reading about things that I allude to that appear to have happened to me, these experiences that are recounted to in poems. And I find that not so gratifying but perhaps amusing in the sense that how much it overlooks the totality.

Matt: Yeah, I remember that night at Cooper Union when you read “The Art of Dying” at that reading sponsored by the NYRB Classics, and you were reading from your introduction to The Moon and the Bonfires but decided to begin, since Pavese had committed suicide with a poem that dealt with that matter and alluded to his suicide along with Paul Celan’s and the semi-suicide of Jean Vigo and the actual and bloody, horrible and unspeakable suicide of your uncle, the director Herbert Leeds.

The Art of Dying

To the Suicides of ’50 and ’54
(Cesare Pavese, Herbert Leeds)

Even to say something went wrong is wrong:
you merely took control of your own death;
and what could be more futile than trying

to pin it down on some one thing, some
reason, a woman lost, some form
of failure, imagination dead.

You had had enough of the same
and somehow that absence grew
large enough to swallow you.

Not the woman with the hoarse voice.
Not the mayhem and slaughter
on the bridge at Remagen

Not the hills leveled.
Not the rows of hazel cut down.
The rye fields gone.

1972. The Seine. A bleached
summer afternoon. Paul Celan
jumped in and Jean Vigo did not do

himself in exactly but hurried
his tubercilli by shootingL’Atalante on a barge in the hard

November rain. It must be
an absence at the heart, a hole that grows
until it swallows you up

until you are no more: it’s then,
when you’re already done in,
that you do yourself in:

every breakdown is a catastrophe
that has already occurred—
a burst of anger

is never sudden, the thing
most feared in secret
always happens.

Mark: That was interesting to me also from a practical point of view – the way that I had suddenly become “the Pied Piper” and it ran through my mind later that this would be a good way to earn some money, reading and talking about some of these things. And if people wanted to see me as a “sage” of some of these dark matters, that I’d be willing to accept the projection.

Matt: I can’t imagine you presenting a false front like that.

Mark: I’m kidding. I would disavow them of any claim to any special wisdom or knowledge about these matters. At the same time, who does have wisdom or knowledge about something like suicide?

As far as I know, all we have is a heap of conjectures. Which pretty much categorizes the bulk of serious writing in all of these various fields.

Matt: How could it be otherwise? You don’t expect people to present answers or solutions?

Mark: Precisely not. But, what disturbs me is their resistance to phrasing their inquiries in whatever form they’re working in as questions. Which doesn’t mean they have to end their sentences or paragraphs with question marks. A question can be something embedded inside as an element of ambiguity that is an enormous question mark.

Matt: It’s true that Rider presents the idea of “riding” – an action or activity if there ever was one – and then you work with various permutations of that.

Mark: I try to…

Matt: And in Provoked in Venice you’re essentially on a journey and you create a situation which is inseparable from any concept of the poem.

Mark: How do you mean?

Matt: That the presence of the child, or your son, who was about ten at the time? Is always there, with the couple, who would like to do things that they’re prevented from doing, even outside the bedroom. I imagine you’d like to have the leisure to look again at the art that you love.

Mark: [I didn’t want to rethink concepts from five years ago.I wanted to dedicate this shameful and shameless bracket to Charles Bernstein who said that the best part of my acceptance of the Shelley Award for James McMichael, was the page that slipped out fluttered, and landed between myself and the toes of those sitting in the first aisle in the New School Auditorium.I am completely serious.]

Matt: Why haven’t you ever tried to write fiction?

Mark: If we add the practical point of view, I just haven’t had the impulse. It just hasn’t occurred to me that if I’d ever thought about doing anything like that, for example, writing something in the third person, something else has always come along to short-circuit that. Something more attractive. Which I would find more challenging in that time, which might be a short time.But the time I’m done doing that I’m always tired and need to take a break. And on and on the cycle goes.

Matt: And with your love of “genre” I wonder why you haven’t tried to write – very quickly – some kind of genre novel. Even on the odd chance that you can make some money.

Mark: I wonder that, too. I’m reading one now that’s so good and so deceptive. You know, John Banville’s book Christine Falls where he adopts a pseudonym of Benjamin Black and then reviews would lead you to believe that this was a genre novel written by this “very gifted literary writer” and always mention the winner of the Booker Prize.

I have mixed feelings about the book, but as I brought on, I can tell you that it’s only a genre novel in quotation marks, just as some genre novels are among the best works of fiction in our time. But not in a sentence-by-sentence basis.

Balzac didn’t write in a sentence-by-sentence basis, neither did Dickens, neither did Trollope. And it was hit and miss but they also did hit. It’s just in the nature of things that no matter where you start there’s always something that’s going to upset the “intention.”

If you begin as many of the writers earlier period of the forties like Saul Bellow did, with this sort of Flaubertian idea of the “le mot juste” you may succeed for awhile and write something superb where every sentence has that crafted quality and everything resonates and echoes but it won’t be like – as was the case with Bellow – where you want to break out of that one. And if you begin with a sort of unrestricted approach, say, your hero is Jack Kerouac, and you do something good, a couple of times, the chances are, unless you’re really an original, or a powerful imagination like Bernhard, or in his own way, Javier Marias, that impulse is going to die, too, and you’re going to begin babbling.

It’s something in nature and in the nature of imagination. That it doesn’t want to be treated and manhandled.

Matt: That’s a pregnant word for you – “manhandled.” There’s a lot of criticism of “manhandling” in all of your writing and an unmistakeable bias – which isn’t the right word, for the feminine.

It makes me think of that line by William Carlos Williams:

“The feminine principle of the world / is my appeal / and the extremity to which I have come.”

Mark: I can never say it that way. But Williams is certainly my guy and I would certainly agree that I share the exact sentiment in a somewhat different form.

Matt: Let me just go back for a moment to the notion of action in your writing. And your interest because Williams is a poet whose poems are mostly ones in which an action occurs. And in your own books, I mean you have The Bus to the Ruins where there’s an action and you’re in motion. You’re in motion all the time in so many of your poems.

The first poem that you published, The Dancing Party, is pure movement. Then the poem “Flying” which is in your first book is all action, or almost all action, until the ending where you discover that the poem is a kind of flashback and you’re in the dentist chair imagining all this.

In “Family Romance” your brother-in-law is driving and, as I remember, torturing your sister-in-law by doing things that make her nervous and torment her.

So, those are just the beginning works of yours. It seems to me that there’s a rapidity and kinesis that persists quite remarkably in a way…

Mark: Ok. But I’m nervous about the “quite remarkably” as if you were referring to the fact that I was getting a bit on in years there and that I should be more philosophical or something at this point.

(Laughter)

Matt: In The Millennium Hotel you focus on an actor who was known for his actions and his movements. And the actor as himself, Lee Marvin, acts and moves in the poem and then the next poem is called “Gratuitous Act,” where there’s another action where a strange, tall Bahamian man arrives at your table and talks to the man and the poem is full of wonder as to how this guy on the lamb found you, found him out of nowhere. Of course, you wouldn’t have any idea, at the age of nine, as to how he got the man’s information or knew he’d be at the club that night.

Mark: Yeah, there was no sense on that lawyer’s face that he had any idea either. But I could be wrong about that.

Matt: And then you get into the poem itself, and you’re on the PATH and you have that sort of luminous walk that brings in all this radiant imagery, along the Hudson and the light. And the poem continues with poem after poem in which you might say something happens, something is always happening.

And then you get to “Motel En Route to Life Out There” where you and Madeline are driving cross-country on route to her exploring outer space so that the actions are enfolded within a metaphysical dimension which incorporates real hotels and motels that you stop in on the way, real gamblers at real crap tables where you pun on Mallarmé’s idea of “throwing the dice” again, in a more abstract way, and this continues up to the end when you’re in Mexico and you’re walking along and you see the moon as you say ‘round over a go-kart track’ a line that I single out of the obtuse comment that reviewer in the American Book Review made about the line – Dick Allen.

Mark: Oh, you mean the review where he said something like that the book made him think of someone with a consciousness of Henry James? Or that kind of imagination and sense of detail – but with a hard-on?

Matt: Yeah, exactly.

Mark: I’ve never read anything quite so sexually ambivalent in that form. I’d rather not comment too much on it, except that if he wants to kiss me in a public place, he can. I do kiss my male friends and I don’t think that Dick Allen is gay. But his ambivalence is definitely so out of proportion to the situation.

Matt: You mean, he doesn’t have an objective-correlative?

Mark: Exactly. In fact I think that that was a map of misreading. In that….

Matt: Oh, yeah. He’s the one that talked about you loving things like pools, right?

Mark: Yeah, because there’s a pool on the cover in a painting by Jennifer Bartlett. And because there are several scenes that take place beside pools or much more significantly in the water.

Matt: Yeah – where you’re holding Sam the way your father held you. And that only in the water, I think you say, was there no conflict. Or was there a certain kind of untrammeled intimacy between you and your father.

Mark: Yeah, but the pools are all meant to be a place where some sort of communion can happen. So, since you brought that up, maybe my so-called sensitivity to interpretation or my sense of how easy it is to misinterpret – not my intention – but what I’ve actually written, you see how easy it is to do that. I don’t see how it would be possible or it was possible to read – that is, misread – that poem and the water imagery as having anything to do with luxury in too much of a literal way. In fact, it could be seen as a study of a kind of poverty and imaginative use or poverty as a springboard for transcendence.

Matt: Now how could that be? You mean that, because you only spent one night at the Millennium Hotel with your son and you actually include the price of a room service bill and the menu in a way that is reminiscent of the handbill that Prince Al pulls out of Falstaff’s pocket.

Mark: Exactly. What someone like myself might derive from one night in a place like that is rather large in comparison to people who take anything like that for granted.

Matt: Surely it’s clear that you don’t take anything for granted. I almost wish you could take a few more things for granted. Sometimes when I read your work there’s no sense that there’s life beyond the moment that you’re in, that you even have faith to summarize. Or that your wife will be there in the morning. Everything is always disappearing and you have numerous references to that scene in Antonioni’s film The Passenger where Maria Schneider says to Jack Nicholson when they’re in that museum designed by the architect Gaudí in Barcelona that “People disappear everyday.” And Nicholson responds, “every time they leave the room.”

Mark: That was certainly the case. And I was again amused and gratified to hear just in the past few months that Nicholson added the line “Every time you leave the room…” to that scene.

I don’t feel any chill like that when that happens or come to think of it maybe I do. But all these aspects of my writing have – I repeat – to be taken not so much with a grain of salt as an act of imagination which I am using to heighten, intensify, and brighten in the sense of making, or richly color the scenes or situations that I’m trying to paint.

Matt: I don’t have your books in front of me right now. Just some notes, but I’m also thinking with regard to action of poems you’ve published in the last few years, like the poem “Wrong Stop,” which couldn’t be more in motion. In fact, I’d like to quote a bit of that poem, which I have from The London Review…

Mark: And I’m including in the New and Selected Poems.

Matt: And then after Provoked in Venice you go to The Couple which begins right away with you driving in “Provo.” Again, motion – entering another domain where there’s more a sense of an ominous presence, a danger, an ambiguity, and also a distinct point of view. And Sundays on the Phone begins with “Back Stairwell” where the question of action becomes the predominant issue, somewhat humorously but also terrifyingly presented, when you describe your son trying to hold onto the cowboy hat that I think you once told me somebody gave him – a Stetson – when you were waiting in line at Zabar’s. And his cowboy boots and holding onto popcorn while walking onto the escalator behind you when he lost his footing and began to backpedal. And you could imagine what the sharp edges of – what you call “blades” – could do to your four-year old son when he fell backward on them. You do grab him, but you imagine having to dive flat-out in an image that recalled what for me is a famous photograph because I wasn’t born when it happened of Brooks Robinson backhanding a line drive at 3rd base in a World Series. A dive which you say “I couldn’t have even managed in my youth.”

Mark: All right.

Matt: Really it is scene after scene. In a —- things are always happening and the things you choose to focus on are committed to certain kinds of physical activity.

Mark: To which myself I don’t fully prescribe, but which again present themselves as great material. Ways to get at other things. Because I never thought of this before but in the case of Robert Shaw, who basically drank himself to death (at will), partly out of guilt at his neglect of his wife, who died through that accidental incident that night when he left, went to shoot some crummy film and she fell asleep and choked on her own vomit.

That even though Robert Shaw isn’t at the center of the poem, he was a man who was always in motion, always you might say “running” and I might say “running away.”

Matt: From what?

Mark: Well, mainly what loomed up before him which was his father’s suicide. So he met that commitment – he died at the same age his father died. Not high in my hierarchy of accomplishments. Dean Martin, the “Secretary of Liquor,” is completely involved in external life. It’s almost as if he has no inner life, to the extent that he brings a golf net with him when he’s on a movie set, so he doesn’t to interact with anybody and he can just hit golf balls.

Matt: The lovers in the one – quote – positive poem in The Couple are always on the move. And their walks are – their motions register a kind of radiance, a blaze of light that’s utterly exhilarating, but still, they’re in action.

Mark: I think the lovers might do well to be in action. Don’t you? Talking about them being together and perceiving things in this way in these imaginary walks and encounters is a way of portraying something, or you might say, getting them out of bed. I mean, certainly if the alternative were to do 17-18 scenes of them having sex in different positions, well, that’s something I might do at some other point.

(Laughter)

Matt: I have a small confession.

Mark: Well, shoot.

Matt: I was curious what your real reaction was to the reaction of the political science student that you endeavored to engage in this discussion about language and action.

Mark: Once again, see, I did it. It’s not “I” it’s absolutely in tune that you should ask that question. And maybe that’s why you and I are doing this, or why we maintain the relationship. And that’s that, I’m going to try and answer this as straight as possible. I think that I was slightly put off by what she said. I don’t mean personally, or maybe I do, and this touches on a very subtle and important point. More important really than the more overt issues. I mean, the ones that are raised by Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or anyone who deals in theoretical matters which for the most part I don’t. They’re really just part of a palette.

Matt: That’s a good way to put it. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way. You’re saying that you yourself are not invested in these matters.

Mark: I’m invested in them, I’m fascinated by them, I’m delighted by them and tormented by them. But I don’t buy into any of them. And I don’t expect any resolution. In fact, what resonated from that encounter was actually a lack of resonance. This is a very, very, I think you’ll admit she did answer in a “straight” way a question that was presented with a little bit of a twinkle. And I think that somehow this brings us to the crux of what it’s all about for me. And you might call it “intuition” but beyond that I would say it’s a matter of tonality or what Walter Bonheim used to call I think “sympathetic vibrations.” That he was aware that people often felt alone because they didn’t feel that sort of thing often enough with other people. I will confess that I often do feel that way with the people that I like.

I had an exchange – email’s the worst for this – yesterday evening when I had said a few things to someone in an e-mail and remembering that the man smokes cigars and always had a cigar in his hand and was doing me a favor. I can’t be more specific, don’t want to name anyone. Doing me a small favor. I said that I would come and bring him a cigar. And he responded to something that I meant in a light-hearted if not humorous way in an e-mail writing back in all caps “AND NO CIGARS” and added something else about something he had brought up and he took it further and dramatically said he could not do x service in the mix of other things he was doing as a favor for me and my students.

And I frankly was rather distressed by it and thought of saying something to that effect – that I didn’t really mean any of this in that way, but that’s the problem. Well, especially in an e-mail, that’s the dividing line in life – how can you tell someone who misreads you, misreads the signs, that doesn’t see the humor or detect the wit perhaps or really we can just stay with the tonality. You can’t then turn back to that person and do that because that just often makes it worse, right? It makes them feel stupid. And they’re not stupid. But maybe…kind of blinkered. I think I wrote something the other day using the image of a certain people – I can’t remember the exact context, but I remember the image that a certain people had made terrible errors in judgment in terms of the destination of the whole people and what they did because they had – remember this is again an imaginative construct – adopted the Greek helmet – I think it was the Greek helmet and I think I was referring to the Romans – which covered their heads in such a way to knock out their peripheral vision. So that they can only see straight ahead. And they’re insensitive and blind to all the other elements of reality.

Of course the advantage of this is “getting the job done” and the disadvantage is catastrophic in that it ignores all the other significant elements that were a part of it. It’s one of the reasons that I’m so fond of Robert Altman’s films. He really did keep his eye on the periphery.

Matt: Which brings me to your use of film imagery….

Mark: Yeah, I had just been thinking again about “Deep Focus” and I remember when I first came across the notion that – and I may be wrong again about who said what – but that Elia Kazan identified “deep focus,” I think and if I’m wrong I really don’t care because it’s the matter that I’m concerned with here.

Well, first of all, in Jean Renoir’s films, but in a film by William —- called Jezebel which I’ve never really able been to endure until recently and I don’t think I got all of it, but with deep focus – I don’t think it’s a technical thing, that may have been a different camera that allowed him to keep the foreground and nothing focused but get the entire background in a way that made the background people almost as important as the central characters. In the sense that the story could’ve been their story only it so happened that it was Jezebel’s story and not the story of someone who was in the same room. And the same is true with Altman.

Mark: It’s also again has something to do with reality. In that everyone is the center of their own life and so every time you see something or read something we imagine it being us or happening to us. I had any number of people – trainers at gyms say something like “when you watch sports you’re watching yourself.” Again, I don’t like the tonality of a narcissistic equation there, but it’s still true in the – sense. And what is it about sports, it’s that when people are performing under a certain kind of pressure, they’re faced with – I was going to say “imaginary difficulties.” They’re hardly imaginary, but they’re not necessary. I mean this is not like someone at a barricade or dealing with a bomb or a gun.

But it has to do with how people confront things and the way you need to be in order to accomplish things and to maintain your balance, equanimity. It’s like the story of A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez, in terms of staying loose. The line that I like is by The Byrds – relax and pay attention. You have to be relaxed. And only by being relaxed can you also be as attentive as necessary.

Matt: Why aren’t these things more often addressed?

Mark: Got me.

*

Matthew Corey is a writer living in Brooklyn. He has work published in Two Cities Review, The Lascaux Review, and Travel-tainted: Turtle Point Press Magazine.

Mark Rudman’s Rider Quintet is now available as a complete set (Wesleyan/Amazon). He is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently The Motel En Route to Life Out There: Selections From the Rider Quintet, and four of prose, most recently The Book of Samuel, concerning the poetic act, and the permutations of wishing and willing. His works in progress include his first gambit into heteronyms, as in Palescon, and Which Tribe Do You Belong To, a generous section of which is available on the online magazine Per Contra, and have appeared in the Drunken Boat, L.R.B, TLS, N.E.R., Raritan…. He lives in New York City with his wife and son and—currently—four baby turtles (who will not appear in his book length Darwinian poem/investigation about turtles: The T Diaries).

Recommendations of books he is reading:

The Leaves of Hypnos, all translations for different reasons, by Rene CharThe Voronezh Notebooks, by Osip Mandelstam
Jack Spicer’s poetry and writings on the serial poem
Chekhov’s novellas
Lucretius in David Slavitt’s translation
Buson translated by W.S. Merwin

Blind and blotted out like a typo in a line,
The yolk of the egg sleeps in infinity.
No. This is not about me, or you for that matter.

It is a recitation of origins—the mother of the measure
Of the desert risen from the gray of the sea.
Great boulders once now ground to the sea washing

Shaven, sandy ankles of those kicking froth.
Bluest emotion tied off with a yellow sash.
And at the summit we survey the gushing white swallowing

The shocks of the river’s golden hair.
But what is strange to the tourists is to the native
Only the remembrance of themselves –

One where fire was in the leaves, one where
The pictures flickered on memory’s silver screen.
And in the tongue many forth were issued,

The sugar cube dissolves into the morning’s green tea,
And the dog yaps, yaps endlessly in the Milky Way.
Nobody or no one is competent to command this ship.

In this succor of infinity there is not a navel.
And the tone here is terminal, no room in the pew
For the daily, common, or sentiment so shared.

So to end is to begin. The cherry siren flashing,
Eating the nerves—even the good citizen wondered
If it could be coming for him. It all forms an arc

Of good and not good—that is to say evil.
The red clouds over us are in waves and ripples.
The old couple is envy enchanted – embers in the storm.

And They’re Off

We have these roses, but the words falter
And in your white gloves I am daunted.
You are just trying to get me back for her,
For saying her name at the oyster bar.

The oily torches we followed to get here,
The rice of memory and the identical dress
Of the brides’ maids: like a red tail hawk
Circling down on your scowl.

You pick up all the change I’m always letting fall.
The apples are sour plucked from the orchard,
And in the tall grass, you just allow what comes to you.

The path leads down to the pond where the pier
Is disappointed for never to read and cipher
What you are leavening in your composition notebook.

The trees are wild. We swim a chop to the farther side.
And what but a hive, or some other
Construction – a pencil lead wasp nest, childish syntax
Without rationale: are you getting me?

Sufficient Paper

She was the one who scribbled her whole way home –
The one they scoured the sink for.
They compressed and limited her very hot signal
Seeing it was determined to dig into the red.

She likes spending time in the yard, pulling yellow weeds
To further embrace the truth, just so, to affirm
The waning of analog models. “Mother where?
Mother why? Mother why this egg blue in the sky?”

She dreams of a friend in a cursive script –
And she is the first to firmly acknowledge
That jury selection has begun
Like a swirl of glitter twisting in the wind.

*

Mebane Robertson most recently published the poetry collections An American Unconscious (2016) and Signal From Draco (2007). He is currently revising his third book of poetry “Lost in the Yard.” He lives in Brooklyn, New York and earned his PhD in English from Fordham University. He has numerous journal and online publications including Beloit Poetry Review, The William and Mary Review, The Journal, Guernica, Able Muse and others. He has just finished an all ages novel, “Elsa the Snake Handler’s Daughter,” and is looking for an agent to represent it.

]]>https://frankmattermag.com/2016/06/30/three-poems-by-mebane-robertson-2/feed/00003690940_10frankmattermagPrologue: Cowboy, by Robert Margolishttps://frankmattermag.com/2016/06/30/prologue-cowboy-by-robert-margolis/
https://frankmattermag.com/2016/06/30/prologue-cowboy-by-robert-margolis/#respondThu, 30 Jun 2016 18:50:52 +0000http://frankmattermag.com/?p=768Continue reading →]]>Somebody hurt my hand. I was walking in the damp grass. A man hurt my hand. He was walking. I followed his eyes. The long gray coat. I smelt the damp air. It was morning, the overcast sky of dead trees. I was walking in the damp grass. A man’s hand, he hit me. I lay in the tall grass, breathing the damp air. I was running. I felt the wind against my face, saw the lake below the dirt road. The water was warm like only in Vermont. When I woke up I smelt death. I leaned over and touched the ground. The sky was overhead all bright shiny stars and my body ached. I wished I hadn’t had that dream. I was scared. I felt with my arms against the ache of my body all trembling in the morning cool. I was one being then; there were no one else there to hurt me. I held myself in the dark. Breathing. Across the lake I saw trees, in mist, a small white house sitting by the water. My feet felt sand. I got up and looked around. I remembered this camp.

I told Dr. H about the dream. I told her I remembered when I was there in Vermont. Someone hurt me, I said. But not there. Someone hurt me the other day. She was, she wasn’t listening. I moved on the couch. She was sitting behind me. I heard someone breathing. Dr. H was breathing. The razor sharp edges of her mind penetrated deep within. I felt her dense breathing as skin being torn away and me holding my breath in the dark room. “Times up for today,” she said.
As I left I saw the girl. I remembered her from before. Black hair and blue jeans. Squirming in her chair. I am walking down the long hallway. It’s a slow motion shot as I watch her big eyes watching me and I pass through the large wooden doors, down eight steps and into the street.
Now I run. The city is a vast concrete slab on its way to the morgue. I love the feel of the city when I leave Dr. H. I love the leaves changing colors against the dry rot stink of his face pressed against my body. I walk along 87th street and Columbus Avenue. I am a movie theatre projecting images on the faces of skimpy girls, short skirts and soft skin moving panty-like. Inexorable and dark, my wading through girls. When I was little I held daddy’s hand at the circus, red lights spinning in the pitch-black arena, crying out “Don’t!” I held daddy’s hand. I played in the park. I was sledding down the enormous hill in the old park, against the iron fence. The snow bends its fingers around my throat so cold, daddy, too. Daddy held me in the dark room.
When I get back to the apartment, daddy is in the kitchen. He is working on a project. He stops, looks up. He asks me where I’ve been.

His eyes. Smell of sweat and aftershave. Scrape of kitchen chair. He puts down his wrench. It’s happening. I think Now is not the time.
“I said come here.”

He’s got that look. I back away slow, real slow, and move around the bend and down the long corridor. Past the bathroom. Past the blue hamper. Past one, two bedroom doors. Past mother’s photograph hanging on the green wall. Past mother in the windowless room. When I feel his breath against my back I start to run where dead factories spew filth into small children, canisters of nerve gas pressed against…..
“I’ll teach you about nothing,” he says. “Come here.”I am running. Green banks and cool water. Me in the stern & Robbie in the bow. Racing down river. Whizzing along the rapids. Past stones in the flaccid water. Racing, saying “Yes!” Laughing too, our oars flashing white-hot against the sun. We reach the dense snow of the rapids along the breech of river made cool by our perfect symmetry, me and Robbie against a wall of stone-incarcerated water. Digging together in loops of glint edged oarsmanship, our bodies press wind, howling one note “Yes Yes Yes!” as we traverse the countryside and reach past
“Got ya,” he says. I’m at my room at the end of the hallway. I lean my body against the door, pressing. Daddy leans back.
“Not now. Go away.”
“I’ll teach you about nothing,” He whispers. “I’ll teach you about nothing.”
My body is against the white door. We are in the gravel walkway throwing stones. Three girls are walking up from the lake. Robbie is dragged out of the cabin onto the damp grass. The girls watch. I see his fat body quiver. The boys grab Robbie’s towel and now he is crying naked, lying on the grass, looking for his eyeglasses in the damp grass as Daddy’s body presses against the door. I’m thinking please do not please you you you please he is through and bursting the dry rot bubble of empty promises, his hands engulf my thin body.
“I’ll teach you about nothing,” he says.

Blackening loaves of fresh baked bread hang in the oven where mother lives. When I was a little boy, in our house. I am pressed against the bed. The orange lamp swings above my head.
“You run from me,” he says, “Is that right?”
“Don’t…”

Daddy’s hand against my face on the bed. The orange lamp shines. Mahogany slipcovers and plastic groans. Shadows fall on the white walls from the orange lamp. Daddy’s hand moves fingerlike with shadows against my white skin. Thwack says the hand. Thwack thwack thwack. My mouth says thwack, over and over. It dreams red. Mother’s lips encrusted with that garden where mother walked and didn’t even see, she was

I am lifted wraithlike motion above the bed. I am a bird. I soar. The air is clean here above the bed in Vermont when I swim in the lake and mommy watches. I am moving under the water going down down down touching silt she squeezes my body flailing below daddy’s hand covered in red.
“Get up.”

I touch against the swollen lip. I am kneeling on the hardwood floor.

“I said get the hell up you stupid fucking moron.”

I am dragged to my feet. I see daddy’s face. His right eye twitches against his short black hair. I am holding my lip.
“Now, I want to know where you’ve been.”
“I didn’t…” Thwack goes the hand.
“Again.”
Thwack.
“Again”.
Thwack.

Daddy is hurting me. He hurts me over and over on the bed below the orange lamp like in the movies when Gary Cooper is being hurt by the bad cowboys, only later Cooper comes back and guns them down & I am walking along Main Street now the sun beats against the brim of my black cowboy hat with the gold star. I walk slow, walk steady past the empty stores, the clack of my boots, all the scared townspeople hiding behind their shuttered windows counting on me. There is no one left but me. They’ve lived in fear for so long they don’t believe in nothing and nobody. I am their last hope but they so scared they cain’t even come out and help. So it jes me. Jes me and Him and his henchmen. Walkin’ the lone road on the sunstrewn street of the dead town Mainstreet, U.S.A., light glintin’ off our guns as we walk, posse not there nor sheriff nor no one, even the horses have fled, even the preacher he’s gone a hidin’ he so afeared ah this here Darth Vader man, this angel a darkness. I ken see em up ahead, waitin’ on me, hands touchin’ steel, Him and his evil ones emergin’ from behind storefronts, gunnin’ for me, and it looks real bad, looks like the ends a comin’. I lean up against the wall of the cabin in Vermont as they circle, my eyes half closed, their mouths tense with hate, a look a triumph in His eyes, and then without warning I draw: Blam!! Blam!! Blam blam blam blam blam blam blam blam blam!!!! When I look again he’s still there, only now he’s smilin’, starin’ at me with a shit-eatin’ grin on his face, and that’s when I realize I’ve been hit. I slump to my knees and grab my stomach. I feel somethin’ warm and sticky and when I look down I see my hands all covered with blood. I’m thinkin’ “oh my god oh my god, please god save me.” The pain won’t stop, it radiates through my whole body until I’m swimming in it, and I try to get up but my legs buckle under me, my head hits the floor, my eyes see sky, and then, without another sound, I’m dead.

*

Robert Margolis, a co-editor of frankmatter, is a writer, filmmaker and actor. He co-directed the film “The Definition of Insanity,” and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship. He currently lives in New York City.

They say the climate here is right for weather, with clouds
unlike anything, ambiguous winds kicking up
dry leaves of the alphabet, where you might be happy
watching the arcades flow in place,
invisible lines of force slowing their flux, happy
to see each season come and go, though
you watch blind-sighted, not knowing that you see.

On the way back you take a shortcut through a field, but
the house gets there ahead of you.
And what is that ringing? Crawdads in the culvert?
Freshwater medusas flexing their bells?
Now another day has worn out its welcome.
The eyes roll up in their snail beds, luminous, serene.

A Walk to the Beach

Where it lay, stranded, one pearl after another. Though it had all the strength it used to, it looked under the weather, and didn’t see us coming. It felt lonely with both hands. We were ready to help, but wanted fresh portions. Wanted to serve, to make of it something special to gaze at with the horizon. We opened our eyes in time, but only just. That was fair. Over in one corner there were lights and lots of sounds. We turned toward them, and it cost us. To liven is to unveil over and over, different each time, less some weight, say, or more patient as in following a vein with your fingers without knowing. I’ve always been bad with numbers, and a little thrilled. Now another hospital has closed, and I worry when I stand next to water without a meter stick or metronome. We get so caught up in the crisis in value, trochee and iamb, trunk and limb, that we overlook the odd, orange object, gust of wind that takes your hat.

*

John’s poems have appeared in many print and online journals, including BOXCAR Poetry Review, Clade Song, The Turnip Truck(s), Triggerfish Critical Review, and Web Conjunctions. Currently he is co-translating the poetry of Ulalume González de León. poemalog.tumblr.com

A homeless man making his bed in Harvard Square. Life sketch in pencil by Philip Nikolayev.

LOCKED

I know two homeless men, they both believe
that evil forces have messed with their lives.
Always, every time something good seemed about to happen,
something really bad happened,
and so it keeps going on
for ever and ever more—
like a bad spell, a curse.
Evil forces will do anything,
repeatedly steal your eyeglasses to keep you from reading,
put you in trouble with the law,
cut the strings of your guitar, plagiarize your songs,
gun down your mother in a Chicago supermarket
during a late night shift (this a long time ago),
make you sleep God knows where, God knows how, alone.
Whenever there’s the littlest chance of a romance,
some nasty shit happens and screws it all to bits.
One believes in an afterlife and in numerology,
the other is an atheist but sings in a church.
If you carry a guitar the cops don’t harass you as much.
If you panhandle and get donations from college students,
cops will suspect you’re pushing dime bags.
They both hate the distant, indifferent rich
and both respect me just because I’m a poet.
How locked are we all into our respective fates.
The rich can’t help being rich, the poor poor,
the invisible hand piles invisible cash,
wants its streets clean of trash.

—

Born in Moscow and raised in Russia and Moldova, poet Philip Nikolayev is the son of a linguist. He grew up speaking both English and Russian and immigrated to the United States in 1990. Nikolayev earned a BA and an MA at Harvard University and a PhD at Boston University. His poetry collections include Dusk Raga (1998), Monkey Time(2003), which won a Verse prize, and Letters from Aldenderry (2006). [poetryfoundation]